I’ve been reading the Lee Child “Jack Reacher” series in order. I just finished books 9 and 10 in the series. Jack Reacher is a truly original action hero, as lethal as they come. None of these books are art, but they are sure fun to read.

“One Shot” opens with five people being gunned down by a sniper in a small Indiana town. A former sniper named James Barr, who lives in that town, is arrested. All of the evidence points to him–a solid case if ever there was one.

When Reacher hears about Barr’s arrest on the news, he immediately leaves for that town. Turns out Barr had done this before, in Kuwait, and Reacher had promised Barr that he would kill him if he ever tried anything like that again.

But, as they say in good mysteries, “nothing is as it seems.” Some brutal Russian gangsters are involved, a group of nicely drawn characters, all of them hardcore killers.

Reacher assumes that Barr is guilty, but when he is attacked for no good reason, he begins wondering what’s going on. He then sets about figuring it out.

In “The Hard Way,” Edward Lane, the head of a mercenary company, hires Reacher to find his wife, who has been kidnapped and is being held for a ransom involving millions of dollars. This is Lane’s second wife. His first one was killed several years before in another kidnapping….and everything points to him being the prime suspect.

So reacher tries to unravel what happened. There are plenty of suspects, including two former mercenary employees whom Lane abandoned in Africa years before, and were presumed killed.

It’s another Lee Child winner, with an action-packed climax with some twists.

Five more books and I’ll be caught up. Think I’ll take one on vacation next week.

“Borkman’s Point,” by Hakan Nesser, was written in 1993 but not published in English until 2006. It’s part of a series starring Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, whose popularity in Sweden rivals fellow fictional sleuths Kurt Wallander and Martin Beck. So far, five Van Veeteren books have appeared in English, the latest in 2010 (though it was originally written in 1997), and a sixth (written in 1998) is due later this year.

In this book, Van Veeteren is sent to a small town to help catch a serial murderer called The Axman, since he kills with an axe. Two murders occurred before his arrival, and one more occurs after he arrives.

It’s very much a police procedural. There isn’t much action at all. Rather, you tag along as the cops talk to people, follow clues, and discuss what they’ve got so far. They go a long time without much of any clue whatsoever.

Nesser develops his characters well, and keeps you in suspense. The murderer wasn’t at all who I thought it would be, though the idea did cross my mind once. But I was more focused on others. Nesser is great at misdirection. This was a totally satisfying plot.

The title refers to a policeman’s rule that sometimes you already have all the information you need to solve the crime, and if you keep collecting more information, it won’t help. You just have to look closely at what you’ve already got and follow your gut.

I previous read two other Van Veeteren books back-to-back, “Mind’s Eye” and “The Return,” and reviewed them together on my blog. Those were very good books, too.

Curiously, Nesser never identifies the country in which the books take place; it seems to be a made-up country in northern Europe. The setting resembles Sweden, but it’s not Sweden. The names of towns and people are mostly Dutch. As I read, I picture the Netherlands.

Five Nesser books have been translated into English, and all five feature Van Veeteren. “Borkman’s Point” was translated first, in 2006, followed by “The Return” (2007) and “Mind’s Eye” (2008). However, “Mind’s Eye” was actually written first, back in 1993.

The translating for the three books I’ve read was done by Laurie Thompson, a British academic who has translated works by a number of other prominent Swedish mystery writers, including Henning Mankell and Ake Edwardson. I came to appreciate his translations initially in the Mankell books; his name is on 10 of them now.

All of Nesser’s English publications appear under the Black Lizard imprint from Vintage Books.

Murder at the Savoy is the sixth book (of 10 total) in the Martin Beck series, by Swedes Maj Sjowal and Per Wahloo. The series has ten books in all, written from 1965-1975. While Martin Beck is the main character, he’s not a dominant lead; most of the books scatter the story among an ensemble cast.

Murder at the Savoy begins with a man walking into a dinner gathering and shooting, in the head, a powerful Swedish industrialist named Viktor Palmgren. He then escapes through a window.

The assassination occurs in the southern city of Malmo, which is home to another famous Swedish policeman, Kurt Wallender (from the series by Henning Mankell). Martin Beck, based in Stockholm, gets sent to Malmo to investigate, and he teams up with Malmo policemen to try to figure out the who and why of the murder.

They pursue threads involving Palmgren’s wife, a couple men heading up some of Palmgren’s business interests, Palmgren’s involvement in African gun-running, and other paths. In the end, it’s resolved in a way I didn’t expect, but which was somewhat anti-climactic to me.

I’ve enjoyed the Martin Beck series, but this book seemed sub-par. Even the title, Murder at the Savoy, seems like the authors weren’t really trying. I finished the book, stuck it on the shelf, and proceeded to the next book in the series, The Abominable Man.

Once again, as is their habit, the authors start with a murder. This time, it’s a hospitalized police inspector who, while in his hospital room, is brutally killed with a bayonet. The usual characters assemble to solve the mystery. The plot resolves in a much more straightforward way than Murder at the Savoy.

The murder victim is the title character, “the abominable man.” He’s a sadistic, brutal guy who trained other cops in his ways. It makes for an interesting character. But the authors didn’t really do anything with the character.  And who killed him? We never learn much about him. When a list is discovered of other police targets, Martin Beck is on the list…but we’re never told why. The killer had a motive for killing the “abominable” guy, but not for killing anyone else. There is a killing spree at the end, but again, it’s all pointless, without motive.

I didn’t like either of these books. I’ve enjoyed the previous Martin Beck books, but these two were really lame.